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The cake was intended to be an experiment from the beginning. She purchased the cake in 1981 and "let it site for a few months" to see what would happen. She also purchased an apple at the same time. Of course, the apple began to decompose in fairly short order, but nothing happened to the cupcake. She attributed the lack of change to the presence of partially hydrogenated oil - a.k.a. trans fats - because "the [other] ingredients in the cupcake are all real."
Minsky thinks that the recent moves in Chicago and New York, as well as other cities and countries around the world, to ban trans fats are a good idea. And after seeing what they can do to a cupcake, even if there is no definitive answer about what they do to your body, it doesn't seem like such a bad idea.
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11-01-2006 @5:32PM fluffy said... It's not necessarily the trans fats to blame. Remember that cupcakes are full the same things that make fruitcakes last forever too (the starch locks the moisture away which helps to prevent bacterial growth and so on).
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11-01-2006 @6:37PM Abby said... And I thought these would be the scariest cupcakes I encountered today!
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11-01-2006 @5:45PM james said... Comparing apples to store-bought cupcakes is like...well, comparing apples to oranges. I would be more impressed by this display had she baked a couple of cupcakes, free of trans-fats, in 1981, and carried them around as well.
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11-01-2006 @6:10PM Crosius said... Examining the ingredient list of a Hostess Cupcake reveals sorbates (ie.sorbic acid salts) - which are added as preservatives.
Sorbic Acid is a polyunsaturated fat (ie. a trans-fat) so yeah, in this case a transfat is keeping the cupcake from growing moulds or fungi, but that's was this particular trans-fat is supposed to do.
Aflatoxin, for example, is secreted by a fungus that can grow on wheat (flour) and coconut in moist conditions (like in a cupcake). In children, who have low resistance to the toxin (and a high incidence of cupcake ingestion) it causes stunted or delayed development and can create predisposition to liver cancer later in life.
Its an oversimplification, but Hostess has probably run the numbers and decided trans-fat lawsuits are less costly than liver-cancer/aflatoxin-delayed development lawsuits.
Like so much in life, its a balancing act.
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11-01-2006 @6:38PM Abby said... Whoops! No HTML. These are the cupcakes I thought would be the scariest I saw today: http://flickr.com/photos/abbyladybug/tags/razorblades/
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11-04-2006 @9:56AM Contrarian said... "Sorbic Acid is a polyunsaturated fat (ie. a trans-fat)...." -Crosius
Can you really call Sorbic Acid a fat? A fatty-acid maybe, but it's a couple of carbons short of even fatty-acid status.
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11-01-2006 @7:10PM Word Diggity said... Let's see her eat it and tell us it's still okay. It sounds to me like she's trying to use it to scare people when she hasn't really got a clue about WHY it still seems to be "relatively undamaged". And if that's a picture of the offending pastry attached to the article, you and I have conflicting standards for what "undamaged" means.
Yet another example of the food police misrepresenting themselves trying to terrorise people into a certain kind of behaviour.
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11-01-2006 @7:32PM Dmnkly said... It's unfortunate that people feel the need to lean on idiotic pseudoscientific "experiments" to justify a position that has actually has genuine scientific evidence to back it up. If Minsky genuinely claims what you state, all her "experiment" demonstrates is that she couldn't pass a high school science class. There are a ton of 100% natural foods that are perfectly edible after 25 years, and a ton of "unnatural" foods that don't affect the body in any way. Based on other, real scientific evidence, her conclusions are probably right. But taking this route to get there is just asinine and only confuses the issue.
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11-01-2006 @7:46PM Dmnkly said... I see from her website that Minsky holds Bachelor of Science in Education and Master of Public Health degrees... which only makes it clear that she KNOWS her "experiment" has no scientific merit, and it's even more unfortunate that she'd present it as such.
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11-02-2006 @2:17AM Senator K said... Yeah, trans fat is bad for us. But the solution should be to educate consumers, and not ban it outright. Remember the foie gra ban? The government just want to stick its finger into another part of our life.
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11-02-2006 @7:34AM kylie lambert said... If fresh ingredients are used & no preservatives/bad trans fats, then I assume the cupcake wouldn't last. I did some for display for an expo recently only using a commercial mix & commercial icing (it smelt like paint) & after 2 months they still look perfect. I suspect by next years expo I could still present them in perfect condition! I don't know how cupcake places use these mixes!
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11-02-2006 @10:03AM Blarg said... Senator K, the government has been "sticking its finger into this part of our life" for over 100 years. That's the entire purpose of the FDA. It's not new. And it's not at all related to the foie gra ban, which was based on animal cruelty, not health.
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11-02-2006 @2:23PM Heather said... Dmnkly-
What foods remain edible for 25 years? And by "perfectly edible," do you mean they would taste the same as they did 25 years earlier, or just that they would not have suffered significant decay?
I didn't really get the impression that she was passing this off as actual science. It seems like more of a gross-out tactic. I mean, I haven't eaten McDonalds fries since I saw "Supersize Me," but it's not because I think that the movie was any kind of shining example of the scientific method in action. It's because those fries refuse to decay. And that's just weird.
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11-02-2006 @2:48PM p38 said... In about 1978, I was a dietetic student in university and was told all about the wonders of trans fats. How they were not found anywhere in nature! How they enabled food processors to reduce the use of cholesterol containing fats like butter and lard! The wonderful properties of engineered fats! And it clicked in my mind that maybe that was not a good thing. But orthodoxy was highly prized among dieticians so I nobly kept my mouth shut and silently went back to using butter and lard and bacon fat (yum) and avoiding commercial deep fried foods. And I left the nutrition field. Now it seems the dietetic world caught up to my misgivings.
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11-02-2006 @2:47PM p38 said... In about 1978, I was a dietetic student in university and was told all about the wonders of trans fats. How they were not found anywhere in nature! How they enabled food processors to reduce the use of cholesterol containing fats like butter and lard! The wonderful properties of engineered fats! And it clicked in my mind that maybe that was not a good thing. But orthodoxy was highly prized among dieticians so I nobly kept my mouth shut and silently went back to using butter and lard and bacon fat (yum) and avoiding commercial deep fried foods. And I left the nutrition field. Now it seems the dietetic world caught up to my misgivings.
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11-06-2006 @3:27AM Food Tech said... The cupcake probably hasn't gone mouldy because it is a) full of sugar and b) contains sorbates. Sugar (and other small molecules like salt - not starch or fats) reduces the free water available for microorganisms to grow. This is what food scientists/technologists call 'water activity'.
Not all polyunsaturate fats are trans fats as Crosius has stated.
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11-02-2006 @10:34PM Michael S said... Trans-fats were designed, historically, to keep oils from going rancid, and to be used as a single source of fats/oils that would melt at various temperatures. Most come from a cheap source of oil (soybean) and are modified to fit the temperature/stability needs of the particular application. What's happening is that people are now being told to believe (falsely) that trans-fats are bad and that leads to a possible logic that OTHER fats are good. Too much of ANY fats/oils are bad for your health and picking on the red-headed step-child of the day (#13-I like your comments of margarine vs butter) like trans-fats are only going to make things worse for consumers.
Lots of studies are going on right now touting the "good" fats like conjugated linoleic acid as a fat burner/anti-oxidant/save you from cancer and lets you win the lottery fat that comes from meat and dairy. It's also a trans-fat. Uh oh... a trans-fat that is good for you! Shouldn't eat it, or should you?
It's all about moderation, folks.
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11-02-2006 @5:07PM Dmnkly said... Heather...
Oh, geez, all kinds of foods... some decline in quality but are still perfectly edible and provide energy, some hold their quality, and some get better with age. Pantry staples such as salt and granuated sugar are gimmes. All kinds of dried grains, including oatmeal can last indefinitely. I don't count myself among them, but there are those who eat certain 15-20 year old canned goods without a second thought. There are other naturally preserved foods that can easily last a couple of decades. It isn't 25 years, but there are a number of cheeses that age for more than ten. To say nothing of wine and spirits, some of which get better with age, and can easily go for 100 years. 25 years is quite young for a real balsamic vinegar. And stories regularly surface of decades-old fruitcakes surfacing that are still perfectly edible, if not quite as tasty as they once were (assuming they ever were).
The point is that this demonstration, no matter what effect it's supposed to have, is based on an idiotic premise... it doesn't spoil, ergo, it is bad for you. One has absolutely nothing to do with the other.
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11-02-2006 @9:27PM Mike said... Me, I'd eat a hostess cupcake before I'd consume high priced:
Raw Adrenal Concentrate (Bovine)
Raw porcine pancreas concentrate
Those are among the supplements the nutritionist who carries the old cupcake around with her sells.
MMmm. Yummy.
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11-02-2006 @11:56PM Michelle said... Michael S, you are being purposefully deceptive in a number of ways.
Firstly, there is a massive difference between artificial trans-fats and the natural trans-fats that make up a very small percentage of some natural fats. You also make a classic straw-man argument by suggesting there have been protestations against these natural trans-fats. Natural trans-fats have never been the issue, the issue is solely and entirely about ARTIFICIAL trans fats.
You also suggest people are being "Falsely" told that artificial trans-fats are bad for them. You are wrong, the science has Proven that artificial Trans Fats are awful for humans. It's not just one scientific study, it's dozens of them over many years.
Neither is this another raving over-reaction from the "everything is bad for us" crowd (like those CSPI nutjobs). This time it's the real deal. Artificial trans fats should never have been approved for human consumption. The problem is, artificial trans-fats were invented about 100 years ago, long before the testing of artificial food stuffs was seen as necessary. Had trans fats been invented any time in the past 30 years the FDA would Never have approved them for human consumption.
In point of fact, there is only one reason -most- large food producers even Use trans-fats. That reason is Money. Trans Fats don't go rancid as quickly as -most- other fats. When used in fryers, the oil is able to be used longer and replaced less frequently. When used in baking, the goods have longer shelf lives.
For these big food producers, it's not about taste, it's not about mouth feel, it's only about money.
But now that the health concerns of trans fats have been clearly and repeatedly documented, these big companies are starting to move away from the product. These companies are rightly concerned about liability issues related to trans-fats.
There have long been viable replacments for trans-fats. One of these replacements is a soybean designed at Iowa State university. Using plant breeding techniques that have been around for hundreds of years, university researchers genetically bred a soybean (oil) which does not require hydrogenation yet has a shelf life similar to that of trans-fats. Too bad food producers didn't request breeding of that 100 years ago...
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